Saudi Arabia unveiled a series of blockbuster AI partnerships with US chip makers, cloud infrastructure providers, and software developers this week, signaling its ambition to become a global AI hub. Leveraging its $940 billion Public Investment Fund (PIF) and strategic location, Saudi Arabia is forming partnerships to create sovereign AI infrastructure including advanced data centers and Arabic large language models. Google, Oracle, and Salesforce are deepening AI and cloud commitments in Saudi Arabia that will support Vision 2030, a 15-year program to diversify the country’s economy. Within that, the $100 billion Project Transcendence aims to put the kingdom among the top 15 countries in AI by 2030. The deals announced during this week’s US-Saudi investment summit in Riyadh include a $20 billion commitment from Saudi firm DataVolt for AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the US and an $80 billion joint investment by Google, DataVolt, Oracle, Salesforce, AMD, and Uber in technologies across both nations, according to a White House fact sheet The Riyadh summit, attended by US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, drew tech luminaries including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su. AI factories Humain, an AI company backed by PIF, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was at the center of much of the deal-making. Nvidia said it will supply Humain with hundreds of thousands of its most advanced GPUs over the next five years with which the company will build “AI factories” with a capacity of up to 500 megawatts. The first of those will contain 18,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, it said. AMD announced a five-year, $10 billion collaboration with Humain to deploy up to 500 megawatts of AI compute in Saudi Arabia and the US, aiming to deploy “multi-exaflop capacity by early 2026.” AWS, too, is expanding its data centers in Saudi Arabia to bolster Humain’s cloud infrastructure. Saudi Arabia has abundant oil and gas to power those data centers, and is growing its renewable energy resources with the goal of supplying 50% of the country’s power by 2030. “Commercial electricity rates, nearly 50% lower than in the US, offer potential cost savings for AI model training, though high local hosting costs due to land, talent, and infrastructure limit total savings,” said Eric Samuel, Associate Director at IDC. Located near Middle Eastern population centers and fiber optic cables to Asia, these data centers will offer enterprises low-latency cloud computing for real-time AI applications. Late is great There’s an advantage to being a relative latecomer to the technology industry, said Eric Samuel, associate director, research at IDC. “Saudi Arabia’s greenfield tech landscape offers a unique opportunity for rapid, ground-up AI integration, unburdened by legacy systems,” he said. Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said the investments signify Saudi Arabia’s “ambition to become a central hub for AI development, rivaling established tech centers in the US and China.” Other analysts weighed in on Saudi Arabia’s goals. Neil Shah, vice president research at Counterpoint Research, said the push could make it the next “oil hub” for AI, serving both local and global needs, while Amandeep Singh, practice director at QKS Group, said, “This isn’t just about money. It’s a strategic play to become a long-term AI power and a neutral meeting point for global AI.” Despite the vast political and financial resources in play, though, the analysts forecast challenges ahead when it comes to attracting top talent, reducing reliance on Western chips, and building data governance trust. While Saudi Arabia is a lucrative new market for companies such as Nvidia and AWS, “They must navigate questions of control and compliance,” said QKS Group’s Singh. Aligning with Saudi Arabia’s push for digital sovereignty requires a delicate balance between Western regulations, export restrictions, and the Kingdom’s drive for independence. Political risks IDC’s Samuel noted that initiatives like Humain can foster trust and alignment with national priorities, but added, “With the right oversight and governance, political risks can be managed and long-term AI development secured.” Building a real AI power bloc in the Middle East is still a tough climb, the analysts said. “Saudi Arabia’s ambition needs more than just cash to turn into real influence in the region,” said Singh. “They need shared tech foundations, common AI standards across countries, and everyone to agree on policies — and we’re not quite there yet.” Making strong partnerships with other companies and countries will be key for Saudi Arabia to turn its big investments into lasting global influence, the analysts said, making sure its AI plans become more than just a showpiece. Turning Saudi Arabia’s AI ambition into real regional power won’t be easy. “Money alone won’t get you there — you need shared foundations, aligned policies, and buy-in from the neighborhood,” said Singh.

Macworld When Apple introduced AirTag in 2021, the company also unveiled its own accessories for the tiny, hole-less tracker. However, since then, neither AirTag nor its first-party accessories have received any major updates. But it seems that Apple has now quietly discontinued one of the original AirTag accessories amid rumors of a new generation of the item tracker. The original AirTag Loop is no longer available in stores As spotted by Macworld, Apple is no longer selling an accessory known as the AirTag Loop. The accessory has disappeared from the company’s online store and is unavailable in many Apple Stores around the world. Sources familiar with the matter told Macworld that stores haven’t received new AirTag Loop supplies for months, and the product has also been removed from the catalog, suggesting that it has been discontinued for good. Although Apple sometimes faces supply shortages that impact the availability of some products, the company usually makes it clear in its store when a product is temporarily out of stock, sources said. For those unfamiliar, the AirTag Loop lets users attach the item tracker to objects such as backpacks and suitcases. Apple originally offered both leather and silicone versions of the Loop, but in 2023, it discontinued the leather version after announcing FineWoven as a replacement for its leather accessories. However, while Apple replaced the AirTag Leather Key Ring with a FineWoven model, it never made a FineWoven Loop, instead sticking with the silicone version as the only option. Apple’s FineWoven Key Ring for AirTag remains available both in retail and online stores. At $35, the company’s official AirTag accessories cost more than an AirTag, but Apple also promotes third-party accessories that are much cheaper. According to another source who spoke to Macworld, many customers who buy AirTags tend to opt for third-party accessories rather than Apple’s own. You can still find the original AirTag Loop in some other stores at prices as low as $13, likely discounted to clear out remaining stock. The AirTag Loop is no longer sold at Apple Stores.Foundry AirTag 2: What to expect Although the most likely reason Apple stopped selling the AirTag Loop is its low popularity among customers, the company may also be gearing up to launch a new version of AirTag with refreshed accessories in the near future. Based on the latest rumors, a 2nd-gen AirTag is already in the works and may launch later this year. The new version is expected to have a similar design to the current one but with an improved Ultra Wideband chip and extended range. The iPhone 15 and later models include an updated UWB chip with a range of up to 60 meters, compared to 15 meters for the chip inside the 1st-gen AirTag. The technology enables the Precision Finding feature, which shows the distance between you and the item you’re trying to track. Other reports suggest that AirTag 2 will also include stronger anti-stalking mechanisms, such as better protections to prevent people from disabling the tracker’s internal speaker.

Controllers switched frequencies and planes were “safely separated,” officials said. The 90-second outage on Monday followed communications problems at Newark’s airport.

New Jersey Transit urged riders to reach their destinations before the end of the day Thursday or risk being stranded, as last-minute talks continued in a bid to avert a rail strike by train engineers that would affect some 350,000 commuters in New Jersey and New York City. The labor dispute is stressing out some Manhattan commuters and already disrupting travel to Shakira concerts Thursday and Friday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Amid the uncertainty over whether the strike would happen, the transit agency canceled train and bus service at the stadium. The system’s advisory provided riders with details on contingency plans that would take effect if engineers walk off the job at 12:01 a.m. ET Friday. The agency plans to increase bus service, saying it would add “very limited” capacity to existing New York commuter bus routes in close proximity to rail stations and will contract with private carriers to operate bus service from key regional park-and-ride locations during weekday peak periods. However, the agency noted that the buses would not be able to handle close to the same number of passengers—only about 20% of current rail customers—so it is has urged people who can work from home to do so if there is a strike. NJ Transit—the nation’s third largest transit system—operates buses and rail in the state, providing nearly 1 million weekday trips, including into New York City. A walkout would halt all NJ Transit commuter trains, which provide heavily used public transit routes between New York City’s Penn Station on one side of the Hudson River and communities in northern New Jersey on the other, as well as the Newark Airport, which has grappled with unrelated delays of its own recently. Wages have been the main sticking point of the negotiations between the agency and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. The union says its members earn an average salary of $113,000 a year and that an agreement could be reached if agency CEO Kris Kolluri agrees to an average yearly salary of $170,000. NJ Transit leadership, though, disputes the union’s data, saying the engineers have average total earnings of $135,000 annually, with the highest earners exceeding $200,000. If the walkout happens, it would be the state’s first transit strike in more than 40 years. It comes a month after union members overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management. The parties met Monday with a federal mediation board in Washington to discuss the dispute, but both sides and the board have declined to comment on whether any progress has been made in subsequent talks this week. —Bruce Shipkowski, Associated Press

Plus, Sony Pictures Imageworks on ‘cubifying’ characters and environments, making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly, and dealing with an intense array of different hair types on greenscreens. Yes, the internet has gone wild over *that* scene in Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie, when a baby zombie rides on the back of a chicken—the chicken jockey. Behind the visual effects of that sequence was Sony Pictures Imageworks, working with production visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon.  “I remember early on looking at that scene and going, ‘This is the one the fans are going to love. The kids are going to love this,’” shares Imageworks visual effects supervisor Seth Maury. “That scene started with storyboards. Then we worked with Dan to create little animated vignettes of the characters. For the baby zombie and the chicken, we recreated one of the boards, which was the baby zombie falling out of the box onto the chicken. The director saw it and had such a good reaction to it, so we knew we were onto something that was energetic and fun.” During production, the scene—which takes place in a wrestling ring in the Woodland Mansion against Jason Momoa’s Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison character—was filmed in a three-walled set. Imageworks extended that environment and then tackled the character animation (Wētā FX was involved in designing the characters and co-ordinating a motion capture shoot in their mocap facility). Says Maury about the final results: “I just remember looking at that one and thinking, ‘Wow, this looks great and people are going to love this,’ but you don’t know until you let it out in the wild what’s going to happen.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jared Hess (@iamjaredhess) Finding the Minecraft look In that chicken jockey fight, and in all of Imageworks’ visual effects for the film, the studio had to incorporate a specific ‘look’ to its characters and environments. It’s something Maury called ‘cubify’. “We had to work out, what does a cubified character look like and what does a cubified environment look like? The rules for the environment were that anything that was a hard surface was cubic and anything that was a fluid followed normal fluid rules. We spent months on what a cubic cloud looks like, for example. How square are they on the bottom? What kind of vaporous surface do they have on top? It had to look photoreal, but it had to look cubified. And my son came back from seeing the movie and he’s like, ‘I didn’t look at the clouds at all.’ And I laughed. It’s like, well, of course not, right? It’s a background element. It’s just meant to be something subconscious.” “The characters were much, much more tricky,” adds Maury. “Until you start to see them in 3D and you see it turn and you see it move, only then you can understand, ‘How square is a square head?’” For example, the character Chungus, a general Piglin in Malgosha’s army who is voiced by the director, presented several ‘cubify’ challenges to Imageworks. “We thought, what does it mean to cubify your tricep muscle or your back muscle?” notes Maury. “We would start to give it edged shapes, but it still had to have some kind of anatomical detail. If you pull back from a macro level, it looks cubic, but the more you push in, there is some organic quality to it.” When Chungus leads a raid on the village, Imageworks also had to deliver shots of many villager characters. Their stand-out qualities, aside from their squarish heads, included largely expressionless faces. “The original brief from Jared was that they were less emotive than more,” advises Maury. “They didn’t have a ton of expressions, and their emotions came out through their body. We still built a proper facial system for all of them and then had to work out, well, how far do we push it? Do they smile, for example? In the end, most of their emoting came with eyebrows and just some small smiles and little frowns.” “I was on set at one point talking to the choreographer and I said, ‘Well, what is their motivation? What are they meant to be doing?’ And she said that Jared’s brief was that they should be like chickens with their head cut off. They’re jumping around, they’re a little bit mindless, but they have some kind of intelligence. So, we started with the body motion and then we had to translate that same idea to the head.” Integrating live-action and CG For scenes involving live-action characters like Steve (Jack Black) and Garrett (Momoa), production filmed primarily on partial sets surrounded by greenscreen or bluescreen. Integrate the live-action actors with their many CG companions involved careful attention to matching the on-set lighting, notes Maury, who praises his lighters and compositors.  “We came up with two light rigs,” says Maury. “We had an HDRI from on set and we would use that to match the set lighting exactly. The other light rig that we had was a daytime light rig which was essentially a sun and a sky dome. Any time we had to integrate or put CG into live-action, the team had both of those going. We would typically use the on set HDRI rig in the middle of the set to make sure that everything integrated, since there would be lights coming from multiple directions. But the further you got out radially from the center of the action, we let it fall off into the daytime rig so that your brain still felt like it was photoreal.” Another essential part of that integration effort was dealing with live-action actors who just happened to mostly have quite fuzzy hair. The keying and rotoscoping involved was meticulous. “We paid a ton of attention to it and we heard as well that the studio was very keen on hair edges,” recalls Maury. “There were scenes with the villages where the performers were wearing a robe and a gray skull cap on with some tracking markers on it so that we could place the head, and they might walk behind Dawn (Danielle Brooks) who has very curly hair. Also, because all the characters were heavily rim lit, you picked up every little bright hair. Simply, it was a ton of keying work and a ton of roto work, and, at the end of the day, painting back hair by hair if necessary.”  Then there was Garrett’s pink jacket with all of its tassels, as Maury describes. “This was the thing that kept me up at night. The jacket has got all these tassels hanging off of it and he’s flying on the greenscreens and those tassels get lost in the motion blur in an instant. Many, many times we were painting those back or we had a CG version of them, which meant we’d cut them off along the bottom of the arm and replace them with CG.” Making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly While evading a group of Piglins, Steve, Garrett and Henry (Sebastian Hansen) narrowly escape by launching themselves off a cliff edge using elytra wingsuits. Mid-flight, they are chased through canyons by a series of flying Ghasts, which eventually meet some fiery ends.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jack Black (@jackblack) Imageworks began its work on the flying scenes with an Unreal Engine scene and previs from production. “We had two canyons we needed to build,” outlines Maury. “Canyon A was modeled after the American Southwest and looked a little like the Grand Canyon. We found some photos of the Grand Canyon and sculpted the silhouettes of what it looked like to go down into the gorge, and we copied the staining patterns and the color banding. Then they go into Canyon B, which was much more of a limestone look. There’s some mountains in China that we used for reference there. The effects team and the environment team did an amazing job putting all that together.” The actors were filmed on wire rigs against greenscreen. “Dan Lemmon’s view was that, if your characters are going to be anywhere foreground to midground, you want them on a plate,” states Maury. “When they’re midground to background, it’s a digi-double. What we did a lot as well, because the rigs that they were wearing were either bulky or didn’t allow them to move as if they were really flying, was limb replacement. We might cut them off at the waist and replace the legs and then do a cloth sim. One of the trickiest things there was lighting interaction. When you’re on a greenscreen, it’s hard to get all the live movement that will sell—the rolling and tumbling and all that as they’re flying—so a lot of that we did in 2D later on to give it some dynamic movement.” The post How the crazy chicken jockey scene in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ was made appeared first on befores & afters.

A team of doctors and scientists have successfully treated a rare genetic condition with the first-ever personalized gene-editing therapy. Results of the groundbreaking treatment have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, with an accompanying editorial by a doctor who had previously overseen the FDA's gene-therapy regulation efforts. The patient in this historic case was KJ, an infant born with CPS1 deficiency, which has about a 50 percent mortality rate within the first week. Patients that do survive can experience severe brain disease, mental and developmental delays, and potential liver transplants. His care team developed a personalized gene-editing treatment based on CRISPR, a technology for modifying human DNA. The successful gene repair for KJ combined years' worth of previous federally-funded medical research, including the discovery of CRISPR and human genome sequencing that allowed the mutation to be identified. This approach to gene editing could potentially be used in the future to aid patients with other genetic disorders, such as sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and muscular dystrophy. A pair of CRISPR-based drugs have already received FDA approval for sickle cell disease treatments, but there is still a lot to potentially be explored in this field.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/doctors-successfully-treated-a-baby-with-the-first-ever-personalized-gene-editing-therapy-202307902.html?src=rss

Has this ever happened to you? You're totally invested in a video—maybe the punchline to a great joke is about to hit, or you're finally about to learn the answer to some big mystery—and right as it's getting good, bam: an annoying ad grinds everything to a disappointing halt.Ads are a necessary element of the free internet, but that doesn't excuse how irritating they can be. Nobody wants an ad to cut them off from a video right as the interest levels are peaking—though that's exactly what's going to happen on all of your YouTube videos. As reported by Mashable, it's all part of a new feature called Peak Points, which YouTube announced during its Upfront presentation on Wednesday. Peak Points employs Google's AI model Gemini to find "the most meaningful, or 'peak,' moments" to interrupt a video with ads. It's not clear what data Gemini will use to make its determinations, but assume your behaviors are being watched by Google's AI whenever you tune into a YouTube video. YouTube knows that viewers are going to be most invested in the video during these points, and by strategically placing ads there, the chances are higher that a viewer will engage with that ad—making more money for both YouTube and the creator. And there's some logic there. But it also means that ad placement on YouTube videos is about to get really annoying. Every interesting, funny, frustrating, or otherwise emotional video on the site is going to have ads placed at their "peak." I wouldn't be surprised if, after a while, you could simply sense these ad breaks coming. Getting around annoying YouTube adsThere are a couple of workarounds to this. YouTube's solution, of course, is to subscribe to YouTube Premium. For $13.99 per month, you can watch videos largely ad-free, among other subscriber-only perks. On the other hand, you could use an ad blocker to, well, block these ads. YouTube can employ any AI model it wants to place ads in the most strategic moments possible, but it'll be in vain if you simply block those ads from appearing. The situation, however, is not quite as simple as it once was. YouTube and Google have gone to war against ad blockers, neutering popular options like uBlock Origin on Chrome, and finding new ways to stop users who are using ad blockers from watching YouTube. Even still, there are always ways around YouTube's tactics.

How every designer’s favorite app is turning design dreams into code nightmares.Image by authorIf you’re a Figma fanatic, you’ve probably heard about the launch of Figma Sites — a new tool that promises to let designers create and publish fully interactive websites directly from the platform.At first glance, it sounds revolutionary. No need to hand off Figma files to a developer or convert them into Framer or Webflow layouts. Just click a few buttons and — boom — instant websites. But if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to dig into the code it produces. And, not surprisingly, it’s a mess — a sea of <div> and <span> tags and random classes with zero regard for semantic structure.Screenshot of code generated by Figma Sites.For those who don’t know, semantics in code means using HTML elements that clearly describe their purpose — like <header> for page headers, <section> for content sections, and <article> for standalone content.Proper class structures are just as crucial — they should be meaningful, consistent, and follow naming conventions that make the code readable and maintainable.For example, instead of using class="css-z91rnx" which is the kind of autogenerated gibberish Figma Sites spits out, it should be something like class="header-main" or class="btn-primary" to clearly convey the element’s purpose and maintain consistency across the project.And good code isn’t just about neatness. It’s essential for accessibility. Semantic elements like <nav> and <button> aren’t just for show — they help screen readers and assistive technology navigate the page, making it usable for everyone.Then there’s SEO. Search engines rely on semantic structure to properly index content. If your site is a sea of <div> tags with meaningless classes, search engines struggle to understand the hierarchy and relevance of your content. That means your Figma site might look good but rank like garbage.But let’s be real — the biggest red flag here is how Figma Sites feels like another rushed-to-market product. It’s yet another low-code, no-code tool jumping on the “vibe coding” bandwagon — prioritizing drag-and-drop ease over actual code quality. It’s like they’re cashing in on the trend without caring about what’s under the hood.And that’s a problem. I get that a lot of new designers don’t know how to assess front-end code, but Figma should know better.This points to one of two things — either Figma is incompetent, or they’re deliberately misleading designers into thinking this is publishable code. And I’d like to believe a company like Figma isn’t incompetent, which leaves us with the second option — they’re selling a promise that doesn’t deliver.Don’t get me wrong — it does produce code, just in the most rudimentary way possible. By “deliver,” I mean quality code that actually aligns with the standards they claim to uphold.I’m willing to give Figma the benefit of the doubt and assume they have internal developers working on this tool who know what bad code looks like. So maybe Sites was rushed out the door to meet a deadline (cough, Config 2025), even though it wasn’t ready.To be fair, Figma does say Sites is in open beta, but there’s a big difference between a beta release and convincing people it’s nearly production-ready — and Sites is nowhere close to delivering quality websites.But if that’s the case, why not just admit it’s more of a work in progress than something shippable? Oh right, because that would hurt the bottom line. And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s always about.Figma Config 2025Figma Sites, as it stands, is nothing more than a glorified prototyping tool — because no one with an ounce of dignity would launch a site, even a basic landing page, using such atrocious code.But prototyping is what Figma already does best — it’s the platform’s core function. So unless they plan to overhaul Sites, it’s just another excuse to squeeze more money out thier users. Classic corporate move.But it’s not all doom and gloom— Figma just gave us a masterclass in what not to do. If they’re serious about empowering designers to create real websites, there’s a right way to do it.And here’s the kicker — we, as designers, have the power to push them to deliver a tool that actually lives up to the hype. But that means dropping the fanboy mentality and critiquing these features with the same scrutiny we’d apply to our own work.Instead of selling a half-baked solution, Figma could invest in making Sites a real, production-ready tool that generates semantic, accessible, and SEO-friendly code. That would be a game changer — a tool that not only simplifies the design-to-code workflow but actually upholds the standards that matter.Until then, if you care about how your work performs beyond the Figma canvas, it might be time to keep a developer on speed dial. Or better yet, learn some basic front-end code yourself. Because knowing how to spot bad code is the first step in demanding better from companies like Figma.Don’t miss out! Join my email list and receive the latest content.Figma Sites: innovation or exploitation? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In an age dominated by streaming services and smart speakers, the resurgence of analog audio might seem like a cultural contradiction. But nostalgia is powerful, and retro media formats like vinyl records, CDs, and now cassette tapes are making a noticeable comeback. For those who long for the tactile joy of flipping a cassette and curating mixtapes, the We Are Rewind WE-001 EDITH cassette player brings that experience back – this time, with modern convenience and a splash of playful style. The WE-001 EDITH is the latest release from We Are Rewind, a French company focused on revitalizing analog music formats with a fresh twist. While We Are Rewind has previously launched several cassette player models in a variety of colors, the EDITH model stands out for its bold design. Its bright pink body with aqua accents evokes unmistakable Barbiecore aesthetics – fun, vibrant, and nostalgic. But the appeal of the EDITH isn’t just skin-deep. It retains the vintage charm of classic cassette players while incorporating a suite of modern features that make it more practical and versatile than its predecessors. Unlike the plastic-bodied Walkmans of the past, the WE-001 EDITH boasts a durable aluminum exterior, giving it a solid and premium feel. Inside, it supports Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity, allowing users to listen to cassette tapes through wireless headphones or speakers. This means you can enjoy your analog music collection without sacrificing the convenience of your favorite wireless audio gear. Another notable upgrade is the USB-C rechargeable battery, which eliminates the need for AA or AAA batteries. The device provides up to 12 hours of playback on a single charge, making it perfect for long listening sessions at home or on the go. An LED indicator tells you when it’s time to recharge. In keeping with the spirit of cassette culture, the player includes a 3.5mm aux input, which allows users to record directly onto blank cassette tapes from a phone, computer, or powered microphone. Whether you’re archiving voice memos, making new mixtapes, or experimenting with lo-fi music production, this feature offers a rare level of creative flexibility. For the full retro effect, We Are Rewind also sells matching wireless headphones, designed to echo the aesthetic of vintage over-ear sets. These headphones are sold separately but complement the cassette player perfectly for those seeking a fully coordinated throwback look. The We Are Rewind WE-001 EDITH cassette player is currently available for $159. To purchase, please visit wearerewind.com. Photography courtesy of We Are Rewind.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Final Destination 5, the most recent installment in the horror-movie franchise where someone responds to a premonition about deadly disaster by saving the victims, who death then jealously pursues in the order they should have died, through a series of ridiculous contrivances. The series revives with Final Destination: Bloodlines, which puts a new twist on the gimmick: This time around, one survivor of the original disaster staved off death long enough to have kids and grandkids, so death chases them down too, in order of birth.  For a lot of filmmakers, that time gap would be a reason to start from scratch as much as possible, to revamp and update the franchise. Directors Adam B. Stein and Zach Lipovsky (who also made the fascinating 2018 sci-fi puzzlebox movie Freaks, now on Netflix) certainly do some of that — including using their framing for an IMAX version of the movie they say will never be seen in any other format. But they also told Polygon that they went back to study the franchise’s previous films in obsessive detail, to capture everything that made these movies work. “There are key shots in the previous movies that are iconic,” Lipovsky told Polygon via Zoom. “We just were so inspired by them. We even took it to the next level — we analyzed every single death set piece in all the previous movies, and built this incredibly complex spreadsheet with how many omens they had, what type of death it was, and what the other deaths were that came after it, to see what the pattern of death was, and which ones worked really well, and which ones didn’t. We really analyzed the key DNA pieces, the set pieces we could best learn from and bring into our movie.” He says previous Final Destination movies showed death’s impending arrival on a scene in a variety of ways, “whether that’s through wind, or the way the camera moves, or the way water drips, or things like that,” which the directors picked up for Bloodlines. “But even the fun they had with the way they transition from one scene to the next, we were really inspired by that as well. One of our all-time favorite shots is when [2006’s Final Destination 3] cuts from the two tanning beds to the two coffins. It’s cinematic, but it also has an irony and a fun to it. That’s the tone you’re always trying to capture.” The “arrival of death” tipoffs in a Final Destination movie also include creepy music cues, and ominous shots of the various mundane objects that are about to self-assemble into a murderous Rube Goldberg device leading to a messy death. But with Bloodlines, Stein says, the team added in IMAX camera cues. “Because we got to work with the IMAX team, to film it for IMAX with their cameras and their specs, they really encouraged us to see if there was a way we could use the IMAX aspect ratio shift as a creative tool,” Stein says. “And that got us really excited to use it almost as a omen in itself. In the IMAX version of this movie, there is a specific shot where we have a creepy push-in for each death sequence that we designed to be the moment where we expand to the IMAX aspect ratio right as death arrives. It’s the harbinger of death.” That effect won’t be visible at all for people in regular theaters, or watching the film later in home formats, Stein says. “It’s only in the IMAX version of the movie, which you can only see opening week in IMAX theaters. It’ll never be released on home video or on streaming. So for audiences that don’t know that’s what’s happening, they’ll just feel it as a bit of an increase in the intensity in those moments, as they get sucked into that bigger aspect ratio. And for the IMAX fans who have a keen eye, who are looking out for it, they’ll be able to see those particular shots where death arrives and leaves each scene.” Stein and Lipovsky’s enthusiasm for the franchise shows through when they talk about the details of their plot, with the central family facing death one by one. But they light up even more when talking about the filmmaking process. “Final Destination is the ultimate treat for a filmmaker to shoot, because there is no personified antagonist,” Lipovsky said. “There’s no monster, there’s no man with a knife, no nothing. It’s just shots of objects and the wind, and the way the camera rotates slightly and pushes in. Ultimately, it’s really the filmmaking that’s coming for these characters, and all the clever ways these objects are misdirecting them and moving around them — which is ultimately us. “So basically, Adam and I got to be death, to build all these crazy machines and use all the tools of cinema we delight in to create tension. And that’s a really just a beautiful gift as a filmmaker to indulge yourself with, and to play with all the incredible technicians we collaborated with, to just give the sense that there’s an evil force there, even though you don’t see anything.” Stein says that dynamic — getting to “play death” in every sequence — made the project fun for him and Lipovsky in a way that they hope carries over to the audience. “A lot of people assume horror movie sets are very bleak, but there’s a great sense of playfulness and fun in horror,” he said. “Because you’re letting loose with your dark sense of humor, and all the technicians are having so much fun with being covered in fake blood, and having fake bodies being torn apart by puppeteers. All those practical effects bring a lot of fun to the set, as everyone’s figuring out how to do all this stuff. “And I think that comes across on screen, especially in a tone like Final Destination’s. We always said we wanted to create a movie where you have to watch it through your fingers ’cause it’s so intense, but you’re also laughing at the same time. And when you see this movie in a packed theater with an audience that is really coming into the audience experience in that way — everyone is horrified, and they have to look away. But they’re also laughing uproariously, which I think surprises some people when they really see this movie in a packed theater.” Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters on May 16.